Insurer and Fintech Company Bitt in new cooperation deal

BRIDGETOWN - Insurance Corporation of Barbados Limited (ICBL) has joined forces with financial technology firm Bitt to leverage blockchain technology aimed at making the nation’s largest insurer more efficient and customer-friendly.

As the two companies signed a memorandum of understanding on Tuesday, Managing Director and Chief Executive Officer of ICBL Geoff Scott said the new partnership would make it easy for policyholders to do business with the insurance company.

The MOU sets the framework for both companies to work together on a number of projects in the future, he said.

“It is only about the customers for us. If blockchain can be made to help us with our customer due diligence, our onboarding process, the process of paying us [and] maybe ultimately the process of pushing product to customers . . . [that] will be a huge advantage to our customers and therefore to us,” the ICBL CEO said.

“This is about using technology and a level of expertise that we don’t necessarily have in the insurance industry right now, and ICBL wants to be right out in the front of that. The mission at the end of the day is to make it easier to do business with us. At ICBL, that is actually in our strategy. We are looking at every way we can for our customers to make it easy to do business with us,” he added.

The MOU covers a number of areas for cooperation including compliance, insurance claims, onboarding, automation of client information, and payment.

Both companies said they will be examining the areas of priority and what areas could be tacked in the first instance.

Bitt chief executive Senator Rawdon Adams said the new partnership would result in an improvement in efficiency at the insurance giant.

“A lot of the technology that we use is really designed to take cost out of processes. There are a lot of processes in insurance and a lot of places that we can help make things go faster, more efficiently and more cheaply also,” said Senator Adams.

“Initially we are really looking at process improvements. So operational processes that ICBL carry out that they may want to carry out better, automate more and generate a lot of convenience and productivity for their customer base,” he added.